BATON ROUGE — The LSU Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to name McNeese State University President Wade Rousse as the next president of Louisiana State University. University of Alabama Provost Jim Dalton, one of the finalists for the top position, was appointed executive vice president and chancellor of the Baton Rouge campus. The dual hires mark the first time LSU will have separate system and main campus leaders since the roles were merged in 2012.
Rousse, who has led McNeese since 2024, was among three finalists invited to Baton Rouge for on-campus interviews with faculty, staff, and students. The other finalists were Dalton and former University of Arizona President Robert Robbins.
The selection came after months of searching to replace William Tate, who left LSU earlier this year to become president of Rutgers University.
Rousse, a Louisiana native and first-generation college graduate, has been credited with revitalizing McNeese following years of enrollment decline and natural disasters that battered southwest Louisiana. During his first year as president, McNeese saw its first enrollment increase in 14 years, including a 13% rise in first-time freshmen and full occupancy in campus housing for the first time in two decades.
Before becoming president, Rousse held several key roles at McNeese, including executive vice president, vice president for university advancement, and dean of the College of Business.
In his newly-created executive vice president position, Dalton will oversee not only the A&M campus that he will be chancellor of, but the research-intensive campuses, which include the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, the LSU AgCenter and the LSU medical schools in New Orleans and Shreveport.
Dalton has been Alabama’s provost, the highest academic administrative role on campus, since 2020. His background is in pharmacy and developing prescription drugs. He worked at Michigan, Ohio State and the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. He received a bachelor of science from the University of Cincinnati and his Ph.D. in pharmacology from Ohio State University.
The decision by LSU’s Board of Supervisors was closely watched. Interim President Matt Lee, who had earned praise from Board Chairman Scott Ballard and support from faculty, was not named a finalist. It was a move that surprised many within the LSU community. LSU Faculty Senate President Dan Tirone previously said Lee was favored by faculty members.
Rousse was widely viewed as the frontrunner going into Tuesday’s meeting, backed by LSU Board Vice Chairman Lee Mallett, a major political donor to Governor Jeff Landry. Members of the Board of Supervisors are appointed by the governor, who also chooses its chair.
More than 30 applicants were considered for the position, with roughly 20 meeting the basic qualifications and up to nine deemed “highly qualified,” according to the search committee.
Rousse now faces the challenge of uniting LSU’s statewide campuses and guiding two headline-making searches for the university’s next athletic director and football coach.
Editor’s Note: The Louisiana Illuminator contributed to this report
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